Crowstep
29d ago
Did you ever read Scott's essays Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled which describe the broad atmosphere of online feminism in the late 2000s/2010s?
Yes I did, and they are excellent essays. But to explain the coupling and birth rate collapse on the excesses of anglosphere feminism is parochial. Coupling is down everywhere. I mean literally across the entire world. Since 2010 birth rates are down in Mongolia, Russia, Nigeria, Japan, Egypt, Brazil. Name a country that isn't Israel and you can be almost certain that its birth rates have been dropping recently.
Mongolian shepherds aren't coupling up less because they are worried about getting Me Too'd. They're coupling up less for the same reason as everyone else. It's obviously the phones.
Crowstep
29d ago
I tend to doubt it. If you are a 5/10 who will only marry an 8/10, the deck is going to be stacked against you no matter where you look.
Did you look at the link? Men and women are both socialising less. That's not my opinion, it's a fact. What about that fact do you doubt?
I am pretty sure that in recent years, it's become much more socially acceptable and economically feasible for a woman to live her life alone without a husband. You disagree?
Yes I disagree, the birth rate collapse started around 2010, before then, birth rates were going up. Has the world really changed that much in 15 years? I'm not talking about the 1950s here.
I would say it's similar to obesity. People have always had the propensity to pig out on unhealthy, addictive foods, but in the last 30 years such foods have become widely available. Analogously, women have always had hypergamous instincts, it's just become much more socially and economically feasible to act on those instincts.
What's hypergamous about sitting at home, alone, scrolling for hours and hours?
The addictive digitisation of life has harmed everyone, and it has harmed the ability of men and women to socialise and couple up. To blame that on women's hypergamy* is like blaming inflation on greedy corporations.
*Incidentally, I'm not sure you can describe women's dating preferences as hypergamous. Women prefer men who are taller and earn more than they do, and men prefer women who are younger and more beautiful than they are. In that sense, both men and women are 'hypergamous' but about different things. But regardless, assortative mating is extremely strong. Rich men don't marry beautiful young waitresses, they marry women of their own age and their own class. The beautiful waitresses marry handsome working class men.
Crowstep
29d ago
Why do you only focus on women though? It takes two people to form a relationship. Neither men nor women are socialising much in person, and yet you blame the resulting lack of coupling as exlusively the fault of women, as if our hypothetical twenty-something woman is somehow obliged to break into the apartment of the modern porn- and video game-addicted young man and drag him down the aisle?
Crowstep
29d ago
Or is it because neither she, not her would-be suitor, are going outside?
Women have always had higher standards than men, and yet the fertilty collapse is (very) recent. In the 2000s, birth rates in the western world were going up, not down.
'Women be too picky' explanations have the same problem as 'people be too lazy' explanations for obesity. You can't simply point to an eternal characteristic (women are picky, people are lazy) and use it to explain a time-restricted phenomenon. You have to explain why the characteristic matters now when it didn't matter in say, 2005.
Then how on earth did people get married during the Baby Boom, and other periods of near-universal marriage? How was it possible if female pickiness is so strong that the US reached replacement TFR in 2007? 5/10 women do, in fact, marry 5/10 men. They always have and they always will.
Actually, US birth rates have been on a downward trend since 1800 (in fact earlier, but those are the earliest modern records go). The Baby Boom was a temporary abberation, not the historical norm. But between 1975 and 2008, birth rates were going up. I think it's reasonable to conclude that they would have continued going up if it weren't for smartphones, social media and the internet, so I think it's more practical to focus on fixing the social damage done by those things than by bitching about women being too picky or fantasising about war rape.
And yet somehow such a society has never emerged at any point in history or anywhere in the world. Even in societies that tolerate polygyny, it is outcompeted by monogamy. That is why only about 2% of humans alive today live in polygamous households.
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